Friday, February 14, 2014

Compensation would boost peace talks

Ma'abara refugee camp in Ashkelon, Israel

Pop the champagne corks: a landmark article in the influential Economist spotlights the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, possibly the first of its kind within living memory. It was prompted by the news that the Kerry peace framework is likely to include a clause compensating Jews who fled Arab lands for their lost property.(With thanks: Ronnie)

Much as Palestinian refugees and their offspring remember
the orange groves and cinemas they lost in Jaffa when Israel was born in
1948, Jews who once lived in Iraq recite the qasidas—lyrical
Arabic poetry—and recall the time when most of Iraq’s banks and
transport companies were run by Jews. “Iraq has gone downhill since they
forced us out,” sighs a professor at a gathering of academics of Iraqi
origin at Or Yehuda, a Tel Aviv suburb, slipping into Arabic. “Mubki, lamentable.”

American officials are unclear on the subject of whether
they have formally raised the issue of Jews driven out of Arab lands as
part of their proposed framework to establish an international fund to
compensate Palestinians who fled the new state of Israel in 1948. But
leaders of Israel’s Sephardic Jews (most of whom came from Arab lands)
criticise their own negotiators for not raising the issue more
forcefully.

“Why does Israel ask for compensation for Holocaust victims
but not for the Jews from the Arab world?” asks Levana Zamir, leader of
an association for Egyptian Jews in Israel. “Because our leaders are
Ashkenazi [European Jews], and we are Mizrahim [Orientals],” she says.
“We had another kind of Shoah [Holocaust]. A million Jews [from Arab
lands] lost everything.”

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator, an Ashkenazi, fears
that adding such topics could complicate to distraction efforts to
resolve matters arising from Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank after the six-day Arab-Israeli war of 1967. For some
Israelis, that may be just the idea. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime
minister, has repeatedly raised the issue, apparently to offset any
claims for compensation from the Palestinians uprooted in 1948, 750,000
of whom fled abroad and 150, 000 of whom were displaced within what
became Israel. Mr Netanyahu’s ministry for senior citizens has opened a
hotline for claimants to register lost property in the Arab and Muslim
world (including Turkey and Iran), which, campaigners argue, will exceed
the price-tag of between $20 billion and $100 billion which Israeli
officials privately put on Palestinian claims.

Palestinians are as sceptical as Ms Livni about recognising a Jewish nakba (or
catastrophe, the word Palestinians use to describe what happened in
1948). It would merely add more knots, they say, to the tangle of
negotiations. In any event, Israel’s Zionist leaders promoted the idea
of Jews finding their real home, thus never considering them refugees.
To bolster their fledgling state, they sent agents from Mossad, their
foreign intelligence service, to “ingather” Jews with airlifts from the
Arab world. Fearing another post-war slaughter, Zionist spokesmen
campaigned for “their quick transfer…to the new Jewish state”, as the New York Times reported at the time.

Despite the complications, though, a compensation scheme for
Israel’s Mizrahim could give the negotiations a political boost. Making
up an estimated 55% of Israeli Jews, Mizrahim have tended to vote for
right-wing parties loth to cut a deal that would bring about a
Palestinian state, partly because they still harbour grievances over
their own dispossession after 1948. Turning them into stakeholders could
raise the number of Israelis voting for a settlement in a referendum.

“Of course, we would support it, if our rights are recognised,” says
Shmuel Moreh, an Iraqi-born professor of Arabic literature at Israel’s
Hebrew University, who forsook his Baghdad home laden with silver
chandeliers for a tent in Or Yehuda, when the suburb was just a muddy
camp for Jewish exiles.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)